It was during one of the informal workouts at the Maple Leafs’ practice rink last week when Colton Orr, the big-fisted enforcer, turned a few heads with an unexpected kind of punch: the scoring kind.

On the play in question, Orr found some open space, wheeled and deked and shot. And before the goaltender could lift his blocker to react, a nifty backhanded rocket had found a home in the top of the net.

The play drew whoops from the benches and a shake of a masked head from James Reimer, the Leafs goaltender who had challenged the play to no avail.

This could have meant one of a few things. One is that Orr, though he has scored a grand tally of 11 goals in his 378 NHL games, is attempting to reinvent himself as a filthy-mitted dangler. This seemed unlikely.

Another possibility is that Reimer, given that this was an exercise in glorified shinny — albeit important shinny given the imminent onset of the NHL season — wasn’t giving the proverbial 110 per cent. Or maybe the whole sequence was a once-in-a-blue-moon fluke, Colton Orr making like Bobby Orr in a flash of never-to-be-repeated genius.

Still, if you’ve watched Reimer closely during pre-training-camp skates and official team practice, you’ll know there is another plausible explanation for Orr’s eyebrow-raising oddity.

It could have been just another piece of evidence of Reimer’s understandable rustiness. The goaltender’s performances the past week, after all, have been inconsistent at best. At times he has looked sharp and efficient and in control — every bit the big-bodied puckstopper whom Brian Burke, the ex-Leafs GM, famously labelled the “real deal.” At other times Reimer has looked a great deal slower than any top NHLer should. In those moments he has watched helplessly as the top-shelf rockets that are his scouting-report weakness have sailed past his blocker and his glove.

Perhaps he’ll look better in the time before Saturday night’s season opener in Montreal. Randy Carlyle, the Maple Leafs coach, has spoken of a plan to hold intrasquad scrimmages at the Air Canada Centre in the coming days. Maybe Reimer will find his form in those.

But if you were Carlyle, and you had to pick a starter for Saturday’s match at this moment, the choice wouldn’t be difficult.

There’s only one other goaltender on the training camp roster, after all. And it just so happens Ben Scrivens is the better choice to start Game 1.

That’s not to say he’s the better goaltender. There’s no doubt Reimer has accomplished more in the NHL. And certainly the Leafs have put more faith in Reimer in a way that’s easily quantifiable: Reimer’s $1.8 million cap hit is nearly three times as rich as that of his fellow goalie.

But this isn’t about money. And now that Burke isn’t the GM, neither is it about trying to justify the pecking order of past signings.

It’s simply about trying to win the first game of the season. And for Reimer — like a lot of NHL goalies who didn’t play professionally during the lockout — the layoff has conspired to make winning in the early going awfully difficult. If Reimer gets the opening-night start, it will have been 43 weeks and a day since he last saw action in a game that counted in league standings. That’s a stretch of more than 10 months. Perhaps it would be best if he watched a game or two from ice level before he played in one.

How many games has Scrivens played since Reimer last saw action? The number is 50. Only four of those games have come in the NHL, the others in the American Hockey League. But 22 of them have come in the AHL this season when, after a slowish start, Scrivens has been back to his ascendant self. In his past seven starts he has six wins, a shutout, a 1.71 goals-against average and a .935 save percentage.

Glenn Healy, the former Leafs goaltender and Hockey Night in Canada analyst, said in an interview that lately Scrivens has looked “unbeatable.”

“Just looking at Scrivens’s body language . . . he seems to have a lot of swagger,” said Healy. “The biggest thing for goaltenders is that six inches between your ears — that belief that you can accomplish what you want to accomplish. That you can do it. That you’ve got confidence. . . . His emergence into (the NHL) game could not be better timed, with the lockout ending and a lot of other players not playing.”

Certainly Reimer is one of many goaltenders facing the same problem. Certainly he needs to get an opportunity to play. He also needs exhibition games, none of which are forthcoming. But given the condensed schedule, there will be a need for two goaltenders in short order. Barring the consummation of, say, the long-rumoured trade for Roberto Luongo, both Reimer and Scrivens will see action for the Leafs this season.

But on Saturday night, it only makes sense that the action should play out in front of the one on the multi-game win stretch.

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